Hyperobjects, Tompkins explains, are “events or systems or processes that are too complex, too massively distributed across space and time, for humans to get a grip on”:

Black holes are hyperobjects; nuclear materials such as uranium and plutonium, with their deep-time half-lives, are hyperobjects; global warming and mass species extinction are hyperobjects. We know, we live with, the local effects of these phenomena, but mostly they are quite literally beyond our ken. In one sense they are abstractions; in another they are ferociously, catastrophically real.